Texaco to Replace 1-Mile Section of Aging Oil Pipeline

Texaco Inc., under pressure from city and county officials, will replace a one-mile section of an aging crude-oil pipeline near the Santa Clara River in central Fillmore because it has ruptured three times in the last year, a company spokeswoman said Thursday.

The 50-year-old pipeline, which runs through the city to connect an oil field with a pumping station, “is holding up pretty well for the most part. But it is breaking for that mile, so we’re going to pull it out,” said Texaco’s Tomi Van de Brooke.

It will be replaced at a cost of $100,000 sometime this year, she said.

The company’s decision follows an April 10 leak at River and A streets that dumped 1,100 gallons of gooey, foul-smelling oil into a gutter that drains into the river a quarter of a mile away, Fillmore and Ventura County officials said.

As with the two other recent breaks, which each also released several hundred gallons of oil, the flow was blocked before it reached the river, and cleanup was completed within 24 hours, the officials said.

But the repeated breaks prompted City Fire Chief Pat Askren and the county environmental health office--neither of which could mandate action--to verbally request that Texaco replace the line, officials said.

“I told them on the scene that they ought to do something about it,” Askren said. He said the oil is unusually thin for crude and “highly volatile.”

However, the fire chief said, his biggest fear is not of fire but that the Texaco line will break late at night and oil will flow undetected down River Street to a culvert that drains directly into the nearby river.

“But this crude oil smells bad enough that it would probably wake somebody up,” he said. “It’s really obnoxious stuff.”

County Environmental Health Officer Greg Smith said he also complained to Texaco after the recent break. If nothing else, the oozing oil is “a heck of a nuisance,” he said. He is writing a letter formally requesting a new line, Smith said.

A spokesman for the state fire marshal’s office, which regulates large oil pipelines, said that no government agency oversees small feeder lines such as Texaco’s for safety.

“If it’s not a trunk line, it probably doesn’t fall under anybody’s jurisdiction,” said Tom Lael, of the fire marshal’s office.

After disastrous fires, some California cities have successfully implemented their own pipeline regulations. For example, Los Angeles and Long Beach have passed laws requiring annual pipeline inspections.

Askren said Fillmore officials have not pressed harder for action because no real damage has been caused by four Texaco breaks in the last five years or by the rupture of a Unocal Corp. line in the same vicinity about 1 1/2 years ago.

Van de Brooke said Texaco has not determined the cause of the recent breaks. Despite its age, the line is not seriously damaged by corrosion, she said. Nor is the pressure within the line high enough to be a cause of the problem by itself, she said.

The line, six inches in diameter, carries crude oil six miles from the Shields Canyon oil field south of Fillmore, across the Santa Clara River Bridge and to a pumping station just east of the city, she said.

The section to be replaced runs from the bridge north to River Street, then east to Orchard Street, she said.

The oil eventually is pumped south from Fillmore to Texaco’s regional refinery in Wilmington, in Los Angeles’ South Bay area.